The Novaya Zemlya effect is a polar

mirage A mirage is a naturally-occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays bend via refraction to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky. The word comes to English via the French ''(se) mirer'', from the Latin ''mirari'', meanin ...

caused by high

refraction In physics, refraction is the redirection of a wave as it passes from one medium to another. The redirection can be caused by the wave's change in speed or by a change in the medium. Refraction of light is the most commonly observed phenomeno ...

sunlight Sunlight is a portion of the electromagnetic radiation given off by the Sun, in particular infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light. On Earth, sunlight is scattered and filtered through Earth's atmosphere, and is obvious as daylight when t ...

between atmospheric thermal layers. The effect gives the impression that the sun is rising earlier than it actually should, and depending on the meteorological situation, the effect will present the Sun as a line or a square — sometimes referred to as the rectangular sun — made up of flattened hourglass shapes. The mirage requires rays of sunlight to travel through an inversion layer for hundreds of kilometres, and depends on the inversion layer's

temperature gradient A temperature gradient is a physical quantity that describes in which direction and at what rate the temperature changes the most rapidly around a particular location. The temperature gradient is a dimensional quantity expressed in units of degree ...

. The sunlight must bend to the Earth's curvature at least to allow an elevation rise of 5° for sight of the solar disk. The first person to record the phenomenon was

Gerrit de Veer Gerrit de Veer (–) was a Dutch officer on Willem Barentsz' second and third voyages of 1595 and 1596 respectively, in search of the Northeast passage. De Veer kept a diary of the voyages and in 1597, was the first person to observe and reco ...

, a member of

Willem Barentsz Willem Barentsz (; – 20 June 1597), anglicized as William Barents or Barentz, was a Dutch Republic, Dutch navigator, cartographer, and Arctic explorer. Barentsz went on three expeditions to the far north in search for a Northern Sea Route, N ...

's ill-fated third expedition into the north polar region in 1596–1597. Trapped by the ice, the party was forced to stay for the winter in a makeshift lodge on the archipelago of

Novaya Zemlya Novaya Zemlya (, also , ; rus, Но́вая Земля́, p=ˈnovəjə zʲɪmˈlʲa, ) is an archipelago in northern Russia. It is situated in the Arctic Ocean, in the extreme northeast of Europe, with Cape Flissingsky, on the northern island, ...

and endure the

polar night The polar night is a phenomenon where the nighttime lasts for more than 24 hours that occurs in the northernmost and southernmost regions of Earth. This occurs only inside the polar circles. The opposite phenomenon, the polar day, or midnig ...

. On 24 January 1597, De Veer and another crew member claimed to have seen the Sun appear above the horizon, approximately two weeks prior to its calculated return. They were met with disbelief by the rest of the crew — who accused De Veer of having used the old

Julian calendar The Julian calendar, proposed by Roman consul Julius Caesar in 46 BC, was a reform of the Roman calendar. It took effect on , by edict. It was designed with the aid of Greek mathematicians and astronomers such as Sosigenes of Alexandr ...

instead of the

Gregorian calendar The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most parts of the world. It was introduced in October 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. The principal change was to space leap years dif ...

introduced several years earlier — but on 27 January, the Sun was seen by all "in his full roundnesse". For centuries the account was the source of skepticism, until in the 20th century the phenomenon was finally proven to be genuine. Apart from the image of the Sun, the effect can also elevate the image of other objects above the horizon, such as coastlines which are normally invisible due to their distance. After studying the

Saga of Erik the Red The ''Saga of Erik the Red'', in non, Eiríks saga rauða (), is an Icelandic saga on the Norse exploration of North America. The original saga is thought to have been written in the 13th century. It is preserved in somewhat different version ...

, Waldemar Lehn concluded that the effect may have aided the

Vikings Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...

in their discovery of

Iceland Iceland ( is, Ísland; ) is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic Ocean. Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. Iceland's capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which (along with its s ...

and

Greenland Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland is t ...

, which are not visible from the mainland under normal atmospheric conditions.

References

{{reflist Atmospheric optical phenomena Novaya Zemlya

See also

References